there's a certain kind of "following the dao" philosophy i think i know a lot of people who hold implicitly in some form, which i think if taken sufficiently seriously suggests the bizarre conclusion that literally everything follows the dao automatically *except humans*
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like compared to the rest of the universe we're these alien eldritch entities invading the harmony of the dao, the only things capable of disharmony. it's a weird, depressing, and frankly confusing pov. how did our ability to disharmonize evolve? do any monkeys have it partially?
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if you keep poking at this story it just turns into original sin i think
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the alternative, which is bizarre in a different way, is that everything follows the dao automatically *including* humans, that all of the indignity and suffering and horror of modern industrial civilization and so forth is still somehow harmonious
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distressing if true, click through for full thread
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Welcome to my TED talk:
Chasing Ourselves: How Persistence Hunting in Early Humans Explains the Origin of Consciousness and Spirituality
Alternate title: We're All Living in Our Fish FInders twitter.com/ChasingMyself/…
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good stuff in this subthread, roughly consonant with the above. really needed a multi-QT here
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Replying to @meekaale @QiaochuYuan and @JakeOrthwein
having to do with the capacity to create autonomous imaginary models and maps which become like a metaverse virtual reality where the properties of the wholeness are transcended
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Replying to @PrinceVogel @QiaochuYuan and 2 others
That is to say - mankind's sins are more notable because his light is brighter. He can support failure for longer periods of time. If a less grand system has a failure it just ends.
Brightest light casts the longest shadow. The Dao is beyond good and evil
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there is at least one large confusion in what i wrote last night, maybe two, and i’m frustrated i can’t pin it down more precisely. somewhere i’m failing to distinguish between ways the world could be vs. ways of seeing the world
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There is no should. Only is. I think less "how should we act?" and more "What is the best decision to experience more of X? And why is that better than another outcome?"
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All potentials are harmonious, unfortunately, I mean fortunately, ahhh fuck.
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There's two separate things I've found looking at the structure of action, one is kinda like a tangent vector to the dynamics of things, and one is like finding some relevant future point to the curve that something makes through time:
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The first is a part of the structure of being and you feel it immanently in your body. It's what makes you flinch before a thing hits you. It's what makes scissors into an affordance to cut. It's what composes the field of danger/reach around an enemy combatant
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The journeying with me to 'oh shit everything is happening by itself' pipeline is real 😉
You may find this helpful for teasing out the threads of the confusion
rosalewis.co.uk/awakening/ways
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I think the confusion is from the pesky mind-body/free will problem sneaking back into the picture, as it tends to do.
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Lots of difficult-to-reconcile personal philosophical questions reduce back to that.
Like "you follow the dao even when you aren't following the dao" seems contradictory because we're using two different perspectives on free will implicitly
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The consciousness-evolved-from-prey-tracking idea resonates with me. I've often thought of it like this:
Evolution is like a kid programming a little robot, and we're the robot.
It's like Robot Wars, where the kid doesn't get to actively steer the robot during the game.
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So evolution's goal is to get us to survive as long as possible. In the veeeeery beginning it's easy - just spend as little energy as possible. So the first iteration is just one rule: conserve energy.
So relaxation feels good and tension feels bad, that's the core of it.
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